Microsoft Research said this week that it has handed the reins of its open source bioinformatics toolkit to the Outercurve Foundation, a nonprofit group charged with encouraging corporate participation in open source software projects.

As part of the transfer, the name of the toolkit has been changed from the Microsoft Biology Foundation to .Net Bio.

The Human Gene Mutation Database (HGMD) is a manually curated, comprehensive collection of disease-causing, germline mutations. Since 1996, a team of experts has manually catalogued over a quarter of a million mutations for the database.